The gender wage gap Blau, Francine D; Kahn, Lawrence M
Journal of economic literature,
09/2017, Letnik:
55, Številka:
3
Journal Article
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Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) microdata over the 1980–2010 period, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably ...during this time. By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupation and industry continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution than at the middle or bottom and by 2010 was noticeably higher at the top. We then survey the literature to identify what has been learned about the explanations for the gap. We conclude that many of the traditional explanations continue to have salience. Although human-capital factors are now relatively unimportant in the aggregate, women's work force interruptions and shorter hours remain significant in high-skilled occupations, possibly due to compensating differentials. Gender differences in occupations and industries, as well as differences in gender roles and the gender division of labor remain important, and research based on experimental evidence strongly suggests that discrimination cannot be discounted. Psychological attributes or noncognitive skills comprise one of the newer explanations for gender differences in outcomes. Our effort to assess the quantitative evidence on the importance of these factors suggests that they account for a small to moderate portion of the gender pay gap, considerably smaller than, say, occupation and industry effects, though they appear to modestly contribute to these differences.
The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in scholarly interest in the topic of authentic leadership. We review this literature with the goal of clarifying the state of knowledge in the field. We ...begin with a historical overview of the construct's definition and evolution. Next, we present the results of a content analysis of 91 publications that focus on authentic leadership. Specifically, we examined the publication type (theoretical, empirical, and practitioner), contributors (e.g., discipline, nationality, and institutional affiliation), theoretical foundations, research strategies, sample location/type, data collection methods, analytical procedures, and nomological network of authentic leadership. We conclude by presenting an agenda for future research.
We reassess the effect of minimum wages on US earnings inequality using additional decades of data and an IV strategy that addresses potential biases in prior work. We find that the minimum wage ...reduces inequality in the lower tail of the wage distribution, though by substantially less than previous estimates, suggesting that rising lower tail inequality after 1980 primarily reflects underlying wage structure changes rather than an unmasking of latent inequality. These wage effects extend to percentiles where the minimum is nominally nonbinding, implying spillovers. We are unable to reject that these spillovers are due to reporting artifacts, however.
An optimal pace of business dynamics—encompassing the processes of entry, exit, expansion, and contraction—would balance the benefits of productivity and economic growth against the costs to firms ...and workers associated with reallocation of productive resources. It is difficult to prescribe what the optimal pace should be, but evidence accumulating from multiple datasets and methodologies suggests that the rate of business startups and the pace of employment dynamism in the US economy has fallen over recent decades and that this downward trend accelerated after 2000. A critical factor in accounting for the decline in business dynamics is a lower rate of business startups and the related decreasing role of dynamic young businesses in the economy. For example, the share of US employment accounted for by young firms has declined by almost 30 percent over the last 30 years. These trends suggest that incentives for entrepreneurs to start new firms in the United States have diminished over time. We do not identify all the factors underlying these trends in this paper but offer some clues based on the empirical patterns for specific sectors and geographic regions.
Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder "distraction" measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of ...institutional shareholders' portfolios. Firms with "distracted" shareholders are more likely to announce diversifying, value-destroying, acquisitions. They are also more likely to grant opportunistically timed CEO stock options, more likely to cut dividends, and less likely to fire their CEO for bad performance. Firms with distracted shareholders have abnormally low stock returns. Combined, these patterns are consistent with a model in which the unrelated shock shifts investor attention, leading to a temporary loosening of monitoring constraints.
Our new model of consumption-based habit generates time-varying risk premia on bonds and stocks from log-linear, homoskedastic macroeconomic dynamics. Consumers’ first-order condition for the real ...risk-free bond generates an exactly log-linear consumption Euler equation, commonly assumed in New Keynesian models. We estimate that the correlation between inflation and the output gap switched from negative to positive in 2001. Higher inflation lowers real bond returns, and higher output raises stock returns, which explains why the bond-stock return correlation changed from positive to negative. In the model, risk premia amplify this change in bond-stock return comovement and are crucial for a quantitative explanation.
We hypothesize that a source of commonality in a stock's liquidity arises from the correlated liquidity demand of the stock's investors. Focusing on correlated trading of mutual funds, we find that ...stocks with high mutual fund ownership have comovements in liquidity about twice as large as those for stocks with low mutual fund ownership. Further analysis shows that the channels for these comovements derive from both common ownership across funds and funds' correlated liquidity shocks. We obtain inferences supporting causality from an exogenous flow shock for mutual funds in the aftermath of the 2003 mutual fund scandal.
Although a growing literature explores occupational identity, or the overlap between "who we are" and "what we do," this literature has not fully considered how occupational identity may interact ...with technological change. In this paper, we explore this interaction, asking how an occupation's identity shapes and is shaped by its interactions with a new technology. We focus, specifically, on the relationship between librarians and Internet search. Drawing on an analysis of 22 years of articles from library journals, we demonstrate how and why librarians initially discounted Internet search and differentiated themselves from it. We argue that these responses were associated with a "paradox of expertise," by which librarians missed innovation opportunities around one of the most important information technologies in history precisely, and ironically, because of their deep knowledge of non-Internet searching. Later, however, we demonstrate how librarians engaged with this same technology, drawing upon it to redefine their occupational identity. Our findings demonstrate how occupational identity conditions the interpretation of a technology, while also showing how these interpretations can change with ongoing interactions. We also illustrate how occupational identity itself can change in response to new technology. Finally, we elaborate upon why expert insiders may not actually be best positioned to pursue emerging technologies.
Internal migration in the United States Molloy, Raven; Smith, Christopher L; Wozniak, Abigail
The Journal of economic perspectives,
07/2011, Letnik:
25, Številka:
3
Journal Article
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"This paper examines the history of internal migration in the United States since the 1980s. By most measures, internal migration in the United States is at a 30-year low. The widespread decline in ...migration rates across a large number of subpopulations suggests that broad-based economic forces are likely responsible for the decrease. An obvious question is the extent to which the recent housing market contraction and the recession may have caused this downward trend in migration: after all, relocation activity often involves both housing market activity and changes in employment. However, we find relatively small roles for both of these cyclical factors. While we will suggest a few other possible explanations for the recent decrease in migration, the puzzle remains. Finally, we compare U.S. migration to other developed countries. Despite the steady decline in U.S. migration, the commonly held belief that Americans are more mobile than their European counterparts still appears to hold true." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1980 bis 2010.
What underlying long-term conditions set the stage for the Arab Spring? In recent decades, the Arab region has been characterized by an expansion in schooling coupled with weak labor market ...conditions. This pattern is especially pronounced in those countries that saw significant upheaval during the first year of the Arab Spring uprisings. We argue that the lack of adequate economic opportunities for an increasingly educated populace can help us understand episodes of regime instability such as the Arab Spring.